Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a heart shaped house with chimneys, trees, stars, a dotted constellation and the words home is where the heart is.

House-heart tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A heart shaped house with shingled roofs, chimneys and pine trees sits above flames at the base, with a dotted constellation and small stars above it. The phrase home is where the heart is runs vertically down the side of the design in black lettering. Bold outlines and black and grey shading are combined with red, orange and yellow accents, set against a plain skin background and a dark navy sleeve.

Traditional Upper arm Heart House Chimney Tree Star Constellation Flame Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you're letting the cold into the beans. Right, where was I. The builder, yes. Old Ansel Crake, who could not lay a brick straight but could hear a heart through a wall. He came up the lane the winter the pines went black with frost, carrying a lantern and nothing else, and he stopped at the gate of the walled garden where my great-grandmother was pegging out washing that would not dry.

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He asked her for ground to build on. She said the only free ground was where the stars had fallen, and she pointed up past the pines to the three bright ones in their dotted line, the ones the almanac calls the Hearth Stays. So Ansel dug where she pointed. He built a house shaped like a heart, shingled like fish scale, with a chimney for every winter the family had survived. Then he set a fire beneath it, down in the foundations, because a heart is fed from below, and he carved the words over the door so nobody could claim they hadn't been told.

The chimneys smoked for a year and a day because nobody would light the grate. The family quarrelled over who should carry the coal. Children went off to the towns, and the garden went to thistle. Then my grandmother's daughter came home in the rain with her boots full of river, struck a match in the lowest room, and the whole house lit amber from the bottom to the top, every window at once. It did not care whose name was on the deeds. It only waited for whoever came back.

On a clear night you can still see the stars pointing at the door. Mind the third step, it's loose. Ansel never mended it. He said a house with a loose step always knows who's coming.